What is exit intent?

How is exit intent detected?

On desktop, by watching the pointer leave the viewport through the top edge — the direction of the address bar, the back button and the tab strip. Speed and trajectory separate a departure from an idle drift.

Secondary signals sharpen it: how long the visitor has been on the page, whether they have scrolled, whether the tab lost focus, whether this is a page people commonly leave from. A pointer crossing the top edge four seconds after arrival usually means something different from the same movement after two minutes of reading.

None of it is certain. Exit intent is a probability, and treating it as a fact is how a visitor who was reaching for a bookmark gets a farewell offer.

Does exit intent work on mobile?

Not reliably. There is no cursor, so the signal it depends on does not exist. Substitutes — a fast upward scroll, a back gesture, the page losing visibility — fire on ordinary browsing often enough to be a poor basis for interrupting someone.

Vendors do offer mobile exit intent, and it is worth knowing what is behind the label before enabling it. A modal that appears over a phone screen because someone scrolled up quickly is the single most disliked pattern in this field, and it is also penalised: intrusive interstitials on mobile are an explicit negative signal in Google's guidance.

The reasonable mobile posture is to use gentler formats — a bottom sheet, a sticky bar — triggered by evidence of hesitation rather than by a guess at departure.

When is acting on exit intent worth it?

When the message answers the reason for leaving rather than merely delaying it. A discount to someone who never understood the product does not convert them; an answer to the objection that stopped them might.

The signal tells you *that* someone is going, not *why*. Filling that gap is the job of the rest of the session — what they read, what they skipped, where they hesitated — which is why exit intent works best as the final input to a decision rather than as the whole of it.